Cracks in Brick-and-Mortar Satisfaction

The 2007 "Shoppers at Risk: Retail Dissatisfaction" study, conducted jointly by University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and The Verde Group via interviews with 1,000 brick-and-mortar North American shoppers, delivers numerous insights on retail shopper dissatisfaction, including the following:

Lonely Shoppers Flee: Loyalty risk is greatest when shoppers cannot find a sales associate. That's troubling because 33 percent of survey respondents who experienced a problem could not find a sales associate when they needed help. What's more, the study indicates that 6 percent of all brick-and-mortar shoppers are lost as a result of ineffective sales associate availability.

Category Killers Get Creamed: Of the five types of physical retail stores covered in the study—"category killers" (e.g., The Home Depot, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble), department stores, mass merchandisers, specialty stores and specialty apparel—survey respondents reported more problems at category killers than any other store type.

Bad News Travels Far: One-third of shoppers who experience a problem will tell four other people about those problems. Additionally, half of survey respondents indicate that they chose not to visit a particular store in the past 12 months because they heard about someone else's negative experience at the store.

Shoppers Take it Personally: News about a negative retail-store experience tends to travel further when it involves a negative encounter with a sales associate. The survey finds that customers are 50 percent more likely to broadcast shopping problems when those issues involve sales associates rather than a store-related glitch, such as a disorganized layout.

—E.K.

Know Thy Customers

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